In LTE (long term evolution) and UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system), the mobile telecommunication devices a user carries are denoted as user equipment or shortly UE. Hereinafter, the present invention and its underlying problem are described on the basis of such user equipment, however, without restricting the invention to this sort of devices.
In particular, the term user equipment should be used in the context of this application explicitly for any radio-based mobile or wireless end-to-end communication device, such as a cell phone, a smart computer, a laptop computer equipped with a mobile broadband adapter or the like.
The evolution of modern telecommunication standards, like e.g. defined by the 3GPP provides an increasing number of functions in modern user equipment. The functions of such user equipment have to be tested, e.g. during development or after production. If a user equipment is tested in a real environment, such as a real radio communications network, the conditions are often not reproducible due to the limiting conditions such as cell capacity, timing, utilization, or the like.
Therefore, user equipment should be tested in a reproducible test environment. For this purpose, dedicated test apparatus—also denoted as test devices or test instruments—for testing such user equipment exist. The increasing amount of functions of the UEs allows testing only a subset of the functions with simple test equipment or requires very complex test apparatuses, which can cover all those functions.
Accordingly, there is a need for more flexible test equipment.